City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of SF

Join us for a talk with Jonathan Weber on City on the Edge, moderated by Jeanne Carstensen, tracing SF's tech boom and near-collapse. The definitive and “captivating” (Marty Baron, author of Collision of Power) story of San Francisco’s meteoric transformation into a global capital of technology, and how the same creative and political forces that gave rise to its boom nearly engineered its collapse. Jonathan Weber offers a sweeping history of a city that rose to dizzying heights, only to be undone by the heedlessness of a tech industry it did so much to spawn and politicians who had lost the plot. Drawing on 200 interviews with mayors, CEOs, political leaders, activists, entrepreneurs, and artists, City on the Edge is more than a simple chronicle of a city. It’s the story of a war waged for the heart of San Francisco—one that anticipated the culture wars raging around the world. Its outcome would have an impact far beyond the city’s famed Golden Gates. About the Speaker Jonathan Weber was named the Los Angeles Times’s first-ever Silicon Valley reporter in 1990. He was later editor in chief of The Industry Standard, a chronicle of and bellwether for the first dot-com boom, and oversaw West Coast news and global technology coverage for Reuters. He was most recently the editor in chief of The San Francisco Standard. About the Moderator Jeanne Carstensen is an award-winning journalist and author who often writes about migration and human rights. For her book, A Greek Tragedy: One Day, A Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis, Carstensen tracked down survivors of the October 28, 2015 shipwreck off Lesvos, Greece that killed over 76 migrants and wove together their accounts with those of the locals and rescuers who tried to save them. A Greek Tragedy is a finalist for the 2026 PEN /Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the 2025 LA Times Book Prize for Current Interest. Carstensen was awarded a Logan Nonfiction Fellowship and was the Peter Barnes Long-form Journalism Fellow at Mesa Refuge. Members: $5 Non-Members: $15